06/07/2016 06/07/2016

WINNER! Cateys Awards 2016

Last night I earned the right to put 'award-winning' in front of my bio, after winning 'Best Use of Technology' at hospitality industry Oscars, The Catey Awards 2016.

Last night I earned the right to put 'award-winning' in front of my bio, after winning 'Best Use of Technology' at hospitality industry Oscars, The Catey Awards 2016. As 'digital and brand manager' at M Restaurants (read out by the same guy that does the voice of God from X Factor) I was luckily allowed to represent M after creating the 'Choose Your Table' Functionality' on the restaurant websites.

The presenter, Claudia Winkleman, read this from the judges, "This clever use of disruptive leading-edge technology empowered the customer to be the integral part of the booking process. The solution would challenge the rest of the [restaurant] industry to sit up and take note."

Read more about how I went about setting up this AWARD WINNING feature here.

08/06/2016 08/06/2016

Wedding table names: From the mind of my new wife

When my wife Laura and I first met, we were both working for Bauer Media, who publish magazines like Grazia, Empire and FHM before they closed.

When my wife Laura and I first met, we were both working for Bauer Media, who publish magazines like Grazia, Empire and FHM before they closed. In the early, flirty stages, Laura would sometimes set me little design challenges during the day. She would usually ask me to create some sort of peculiar scene in which an animal is performing a human task. For example...

"Design me a cowboy sloth, wielding a trident at a piñata."

Mental. So on our wedding day, we used this as a nice idea for our table names. I was allowed to spend no longer than 15 minutes creating 10 of these little hybrid beasts, all from the imagination of my wife. We framed each of these creations and placed them on our guests' tables. We got a few funny looks, but most people had a lot of fun trying to find where they were sitting, especially as distinguishing between a 'lion-sized duck' and a 'duck-sized lion' after a few glasses of champagne is quite the challenge!

A tipsy Tyrannosaurus rex winding up a jack in the box

A cowboy sloth wielding a trident at a piñata

A mad scientist porcupine playing basketball with a balloon

A giant Lady (Laura’s mum’s dog) sipping an espresso martini at the Mad Hatter’s tea party

A football fanatic hamster arriving at a cocktail party full of emperor penguins

A Marvel fanatic gummy bear escaping a factory explosion in slow mo

A goat with braces tries to get popcorn out of his teeth at the movies

A surfer cat becomes scared for his life when a menacing cucumber starts circling around him

03/02/2016 03/02/2016

INTERVIEW: Website landing page examples 2016: Top trends for boosting conversion

I was recently interviewed by eCommerce Insights on how to best optimise landing pages in 2016. They featured a few of my campaigns, including Honda's King of the Hell, and the M Restaurants Choose Your Table feature.

02/12/2015 02/12/2015

Passive aggression with design

The lift in my apartment block in London is a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare. It is a four foot wide coffin, just big enough for two people and it constantly breaks down.

The lift in my apartment block in London is a claustrophobic's worst nightmare. It is a four foot wide coffin, just big enough for two people and it constantly breaks down. If you don't close the metal gate as you leave, the lift won't work. So when the bloke from the third floor leaves the gate open in the morning on his way to work (every bloody day), I can't call the lift from the top floor (and I have to carry my rubbish down the steps). Similarly, when he comes home, (and leaves it open on the third floor), I have to walk up to the top floor, usually after a run or a gym session.

On Monday, in classic British fashion, someone wrote a sign and stuck it with parcel tape to the 70's-styled, linoleum wall on the inside of the lift. It was very polite, and I was impressed with the succinct wording...

“PLEASE CLOSE THE METAL GATE SO THAT OTHERS MAY USE THE LIFT. THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”

But the haphazard way it was stuck on, with a crease in the middle and mis-aligned blue brio screamed 'temporary' to me. Fearful of our third floor companion with the memory of a goldfish, I put aside half an hour to create a more permanent installation.

I've learned from my career in advertising that nothing sticks in a person's head like a good hook. Since placing the poster below, the lift has worked every single time I've called it. I've never had a more successful campaign, even though my neighbours think I'm a complete twat.

06/11/2015 06/11/2015

Choose your table function: Making waves with M Restaurants

Since launching back in October, the ‘Choose your table‘ functionality on the relaunched M Restaurants website has been making industry headlines.

[Edit: We won an award for this piece of tech! Read more about it here.]

Since launching back in October, the 'Choose your table' functionality on the relaunched M Restaurants website has been making industry headlines. It is, perhaps, the first restaurant website in the UK that allows you to pick your table, airline style, when making a dinner booking. Here's how I went about setting it up (it's simpler than you think).

One of the benefits of going freelance full-time this year has been that I can dedicate some serious time to my favourite clients. Last month I took a 6-week period out of office jobs, working day and night on two new websites for M Restaurants. Cabin fever aside, I am really proud of the results.

The award winning, multifaceted venue, which houses two 100-cover restaurants, launched in the city a year ago with my logos above the door. Since then, they've been so successful, that a new venue is launching in December over in Victoria, which will incorporate a wine store, as well as a HUGE restaurant.

Martin Williams (former Gaucho MD and founder of 'M') needed an online offering for his new M Wine Store, as well as being able to incorporate the new restaurant venue into the existing mrestaurants.co.uk site. It was Martin who came up with the idea to introduce the table picking functionality, and tasked me with making it a reality.

"With M's promise to not kick you off your table until you are good and ready to leave, this is a seriously great service."

There were a number of low-tech solutions that immediately came to mind. I was given an overhead table plan of the restaurant, and I dived straight into Illustrator to make a pretty version for the website. The idea was to create simple hotspots over a jpeg of the table plan that a user could click on to reveal table numbers to quote while booking. This would work, but the user would have no real indication of where the table sat in relation to the rest of the restaurant. Also, the restaurant has these incredible blue booths that are brilliant for small parties. This flat jpeg wasn't doing them justice.

Thankfully, Stacey Anderson (M's awesome marketing manager) had worked with a Google Street View photographer before. She commissioned Annalisa Banello to shoot 360 degree panoramic stills of the entire restaurant, and had it added to Street View! Once it went live, we had this to work with...

Armed with a feature that now allows the user to explore inside the restaurant, I went about researching a method to add an overlay to the street view map so that I could add interactive elements.

The results weren't fruitful. I'm a designer by trade, with a pretty good handle on HTML/CSS. But some of the code needed to add hotspots that would track the position of the tables within the restaurants was way above my skill set. I also had one week left on my deadline to get something more adventurous built.

Luckily, after a conversation with Annalisa, she directed me to an LA-based company called Walk Into. They specialise in online tours using trusted Google photographers. Usually, the company is used to create virtual walking tours for tourists. Elements can be placed on top of the street view panoramas to highlight things like statues or buildings and create notes about them. The site then generates an embed code to allow you to publish to your own site. This was perfect for our needs. It's free until Dec 2015, after which it's $30 per year.

I went about adding the table numbers and colours to the inside of our restaurant. I won't lie, this bit sucked. The reference points are 2D only, which use X and Y positions relative to the photograph. So for each position you can view a table from (each time you press the arrow to move) within the restaurant, I had to add a reference point with a table number and a phone number. You also need to scale the hotspots so that the ones in the background look far away. There are 14 bookable tables. IT TOOK FOREVER!

Armed with the embed code, I plonked this onto our website. Unfortunately, because the content is being served from an external source, I wasn't able to figure out a way to hook this up to our booking system. We use OpenTable at M Restaurants, so other than setting up an OpenTable booking form for each individual table in the restaurant (which you're not allowed to do, I checked) I would need to add a contact form underneath, with a list of table options for the user to pick from. I added this simply, but the majority of bookings for M come by phone, so as long as the telephone details were on the street view map we'd have our bases covered.

The result is a sexy looking table picker, that allows the user to see exactly where they will be sat. Coupled with M's promise to not kick you off your table until you are good and ready to leave, this is a seriously great service, and one that sets M's hospitality apart from the rest.

See the table picker live here »

Coverage:

Evening Standard: M Restaurants let customers reserve seat, airline-style

Hospitality Technology: M Restaurants Launches Airline Style Choose a Seat Policy

Eat Out: M RESTAURANTS REVAMPS TABLE BOOKING POLICIES

Drinks Business: M RESTAURANT LAUNCHES AIRLINE-STYLE SEATING POLICY

06/09/2015 06/09/2015

Make your own wedding invitations for under £100

I proposed to my girlfriend in April 2015, and since then I’ve managed to save us a boat load in costs through contra-deals, and by designing everything we need myself.

[Edit: This post made it to the front page of Reddit, after I posted the images as a gallery on Imgur. Apparently, there's a lot of love for sarcastic design out there. I ended up having to blur out the shots and take down my wedding website, as I received 20 bogus (but lovely) RSVPs in the space of about 10 minutes.]

Being a graphic designer has its perks from time to time. I proposed to my girlfriend in April 2015, and since then I've managed to save us a boat load in costs through contra-deals, and by designing everything we need myself. I recently completed our wedding invites, using our overlapping initials to create an emblem and creating a folded card to contain the actual invite. All in all, the whole thing cost me under £100. The main costs were to my sanity, and on printing the fridge magnets (yes, fridge magnets). My priorities are all wrong, as I haven’t even booked the registrar yet. Here’s a step by step guide to putting together your own invite…

Create the elements in Indesign and mark the fold positions on an A5 landscape document. Print the sections separately, putting the actual invite onto a separate A6 card to be cropped down later.

Delivered with envelopes, slightly bent in the post.

Start cropping. Ideally, find the bluntest guillotine you can so that you can only cut one card at a time.

Immediately realise that you could have saved yourself two hours by positioning the design in the bottom corner of the A6 card, so that you would only have to cut two corners instead of four!

Get some high quality A6 black paper to act as a frame to the white inner invite. But don't buy separate sheets like a normal person. Buy them as a book so that you carefully have to tear each sheet individually from the glued spine, which will make you tear and waste about 30% of the paper. This also needs to be cropped in from A6 to leave a few mm around the white card, but be smaller than the folded outer. Again, make sure your guillotine is blunt so you can only cut two sheets at a time.

The finished items ready for gluing. Note the slightly crimped edge on the black paper from tearing the sheet from the book.

Assemble your items in a hipster layout on your carpet. Everything ready to put together! You’ll need scissors, glue, a scalpelly thing, some satin black ribbon and your own personally designed fridge magnet.

Glue the back of your white card with the cheapest paper glue you can find.

Position in the centre and press down firmly. Throw the first attempt away as you didn't wash your hands, leaving a grubby hand print on the front.

Cut about 50cm of black ribbon. Use one hand to take a picture so the scissors are floating in the shot.

Make sure to cut at an angle. It looks nicer and it’ll be easier to insert through the slot we’re about to make.

Fold every single outer card the other way around because you messed up the printing process and had them accidentally folded back to front.

Place the ribbon in position.

Mark a dot a few mm above and below your ribbon with your scalpelly thing, then cut a line between the dots. Repeat on the opposite side. Don't use a ruler so the cut is slightly wonky.

Feed the ribbon through from the front to the inside…

…then back out the other side. Make sure the ribbon is centred.

Get ready for some more gluing.

Glue a horizontal strip top and bottom and stick down with your grubby hands.

Ready for tying down! Place your magnet in place to check the positioning and take a wanky photo with your scalpel for the Pinterest board later.

Don’t forget to write who it’s to. Use block caps after your first attempt at nice joined up writing fails miserably.

Fold the card first, then pull the straps together and tie once. Pull hard so that you bend the black paper on the inside and ruin the invite completely.

Tie off like a shoelace and straighten your awkward bow.

Write your envelope now as the bow inside will make this a nightmare later. Like the calligraphy?

Insert the whole thing backwards. It’ll go in easier, plus you get to show off your nice logo when it’s opened later. Make sure the envelopes are old so that the glue doesn't stick down properly.